My Maiden Astrophotography Experience

Astrophotography, a specialised form of photography that captures the beauty of the night sky and astronomical objects. It’s amazing to view how beautiful the night sky can be, the Universe and beyond, the Milky Way and the Star Trails. There were some beautiful photography works out there and they were inspiring me to go out and explore Astrophotography too. My maiden astrophotography experience was interesting and I still need to try out and shoot a lot more night skies!

Renhao and myself decided to visit Little Guilin, a former quarry in Singapore, located in the Bukit Batok/Bukit Gombak heartlands in the North-West part of Singapore. When we were there, Little Guilin was really dark to our eyes, however, once we put our camera on our tripod and started shooting, it dawned upon me that Singapore has a lot of light pollution in the sky. Since I forgot to bring my intervalometer that night, just my cable release, I decided to try out Milky Way shoot instead of Star Trail photography. I followed some guidelines on astrophotography by other photographers and my initial settings on my Canon EOS 1D Mark III with EF 17-40mm f/4 L USM lens were aperture f/4, ISO: 3200 and shutter: 30s.

The first photograph was totally washed out, while it looked pitch dark to our eyes, there were significant light pollution above the skies of Singapore! Tweaking the ISO between 800 and 400, before I decided on my optimum ISO for my Canon EOS 1D Mark III to shoot Milky Way. There were a few useful astrophotography apps and I will share them more in details next time after I experiment a few more astrophotography shoots! For future astrophotography shoots, from my maiden astrophotography shoot, I need to take into consideration the following factors

– Locations : Darker locations with less light pollution

– Timing : Moon rise and Moon set

– Directions : Where to face, South to North or East to West directions

Post processing for Astrophotography is another pretty technical and detailed workflow, I would like to thank Renhao for guiding me the workflow for post processing Milky Way shots. Hopefully, I will be able to do a few more Milky Way and Star Trail shots and slowly get better over time! Here’s my humble astrophotography collection and I hope to add more over time soon!